The Chris Hedges Report: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/18/the-chris-hedges-report-the-secret-history-of-neoliberalism/
“It disenchants us with everything which cannot be measured in dollars and cents” — George Monbiot on his new book, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. By Chris Hedges The Chris Hedges Report The current world order is designed…
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#RentierSociety
Defining characteristic of #RentierSociety is trauma leveraged to maintain order.
Suffering transformed—as justification for imparting suffering to others. Harm articulated as just cause for acting out of self-interest to exclusion of all other concerns.
Where class consciousness is the lynchpin of capitalist society, #perquisitive #classposture is the tension spring of rentier society. Redress not as revolution, but as redemption—going back to promises so as not to go back renegation of same.
#RentierSociety is that which responds to the crisis of surplusicity by sequestering, squandering & scarcifying surplus, rather than stockpiling and staggering production; which elevates growth of a transcendent economy over an economics of immanent flourishing; wherein workerist glorification of one's own exploitation elides a common colonial culture of extraction, thus maintaining chains of supply in name of that #perquisitive gainfolly that is wage-labor employment—all in lieu of mutual care.
TFW, a printer that ought to just have an Ethernet jack standard, instead requires one set up a separate wifi network for it, or else when there's a router reboot it will connect to the repeater at the other end of the house and then refuse to go back to the stronger signal (upon the router coming back up) without being power cycled.
Because just plugging the fucking thing into the network with a physical cable is something the printer company wants to be able to charge an extra $100 for, without the physical device otherwise being any different but for casing that does or doesn't have a hole and firmware that does or doesn't allow one to switch from wifi to lan.
#RentierSociety is this.
From the Second Circuit Court decision:
“the library eBook lending market is thriving… [p]ublishers and their authors have tapped into a profitable, growing market.”
Pure #RentierSociety. Celebration of #RentBounty and glorification of bounty-motive.
Despite the colloquial use of the word "profit" in the wording above, digital lending licensing is exclusively extractive, entirely a matter of rent sought by way of resource control. There's no production here, only usury in another form.
Yes, Usian #FifthEstate has unprecedented power as compared to police as experienced in other places and times.
Absent a concerted check on systems of power, a massive disruption of and dismantling of all the five estates of #RentierSociety, the fifth estate will only further concentrate and intensify its unrivaled capacity for violence.
Generations of #tensegrity ratchet will not be unwound easily. Nonetheless a system that harnesses gravity to hold itself aloft offers no promise of collapse.
The propaganda to consume is part of lived experience; our struggles to question that propaganda are lessons of history.
apropos:
https://zeroes.ca/@NilaJones/112698513791051657
This is Santayana:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112330650496588688
Only in #RentierSociety, we don't just forget the past—we forget the present. Whiteness is forgetting as civic duty. "This is not who we are," as purposeful ignorance.
This is the ahistoricism at the heart of my critique of Andrewism's take on anarchism: veil of ignorance won't fix us.
@callisto @violetmadder @chrisisgr8
This is #tensegrity. That is, what intersectionality is meant to mitigate against; what solidarity is meant as an answer to.
Don't deal with the underlying problems of #RentierSociety, the radical coloniality, that is the root, of the tree.
Just camp out on this branch, build one's tree-house, and declare everything else someone else's issue.
The thing is, one will never uproot a tree from the comfort of one's treehouse.
FFS, we've gone from covid-brain-is-why-bad-politics ableist discourse to leaded-fuel-was-why-bad-politics ableist discourse.
Time for some unfollowing.
All variations on "racism is a mental disorder" nonsense.
#RentierSociety is not, never has been, and never will be, an issue of "if only there weren't so many people with brain pathology".
Indeed, "if only there weren't so many people with brain pathology", that commitment, is a big part of how we get rentier society, how we get fascism.
Estates of #RentierSociety do not want to "help house our homeless". Rather, #disaccommodation #classposture has been a national project since the close of the Civil War:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112698277241990971
To be without accommodation, to be unaccommodated, to be nuisance, is to underwrite #EgoValue of #perquisitive classposture, while keeping those of #conveyancée classposture in line.
To be disaccommodation classposture is to exist as living morality play for others—there but by grace of #compliancism.
There is no room, under the #FrosteanBargain, for stories to be about life, as such.
Bromide that "our stories define us" takes on an especially pernicious coloring under #RentierSociety—the pronouns being singularized.
"In the end, the only thing we truly possess is our own story" says Noah Hawley. This is #EgoValue—to be guarded against any devaluation.
If a story is the story of others, if it is "our" story and not just "my" story, what possession then remains my own?
Stories as property.
In naming the #FrosteanBargain, we name a fetter of autobiography:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112526334493689873
This is the fetter that binds us to #GriefTaboo:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112696330088801909
In #RentierSociety, my stories center me, in such a way as to justify my #perquisition, even especially as others are dispossessed…
While your stories are about you, such that to hear your stories is to take something away from me. Whiteness:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112365295385733995
This is what makes commiserative storytelling so threatening.
Ah, yes, the let's-hope-something-else-ends-the-world-to-save-us-from-ourselves humor.
That apocalypse—and presumably subsequent post-apocalypse—is, for many, only imaginable alternative to #RentierSociety…
Is demonstrative of just how beknotted is tangle of consensus reality.
"is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to [capitalist realism]"
~ Jameson or Žižek or whoever
So much collective #mourning work awaiting our attention. That work will be anything but easy. Still we must.
Rather, #lumpentheory begins with humus…
Begins with definition of those who are the fundamental matter—the raw material—without which #RentierSociety cannot function.
Just as Marx opined the landlord class would be subsumed by the capitalist class, only for the latter to be colonized by the former…
So too he suggested we lumpen would rot away—being remnants of "old society"—only for the society that followed to enclose and foreclose us, so to more efficiently farm us.
No longer "undefined".
Which is to say, #RentierSociety is not capitalist society, yet neither any sort of "neo"-feudalism.
Where estates of the realm checked power of king by checking the power of each the other…
Estates of rentier society check power of each #classposture which #tensegrity cultivates for #RentBounty harvest…
Very power of those so subjugated being the crop: #conveyancée, levied for exchange value; #disaccommodation, tilled for #EgoValue; #conquistadas, reproductive labor-power, itself, harnessed.
How #lumpentheory understands power in #RentierSociety:
We speak of five classpostures: oligarch, #perquisitive, #conveyancée, #disaccommodation, and #conquistadas.
We speak of five estates: the #KayfabePanto, those of oligarch #classposture, those of perquisitive classposture, the consensus media, and armed enforcement.
Note partial overlap. Unlike the estates of the realm, wherein the third estate were the Commons, in rentier society most classpostures… have no estate.
This is #tensegrity.
We shall not resolve a short circuit of collective #mourning by shaming a stage of grief in its incompletion.
Disparagement of mourning is itself mourning incomplete. Angry refusal of this truth is itself denial.
A denial that has been long with us, longer than our pandemic, longer even than #RentierSociety.
Chaucer has Theseus berate mourners on the road for disturbing his festivities; then chastise Palamon & Emelye for continuing to mourn Arcite.
Such #GriefTaboo is all our "Long Denial".
Which is all to say, the "tech industry" is but tip of the colonialist iceberg.
Elderly and disabled neighbors are killed less frequently as pandemic's toll rises, AP data analysis no doubt would find
https://spore.social/@ayoub/112582226667911335
#WhiteSupremacy #HealthSupremacy #racism #ableism #RentierSociety #Gaza #CovidIsNotOver
The perhaps unwitting double entendre of bodily manifesting a red line around the white man's house.